Language, not gripping story, marks ‘Night Stages’

“The Night Stages” by Jane Urquhart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $26)

Canadian writer Urquhart’s eighth novel moves in and out of the lives of four characters whose narratives intersect at various places. These lives are marked by sorrows and attempts to heal fractured relationships.

What marks “The Night Stages” is its language. Urquhart, who has published four volumes of poetry, paints pictures of Ireland, where much of the novel is set, as well as Newfoundland and Italy. She describes a river “oiled by moonlight.” One character notices eyeglasses in a shop window in Italy, “standing row on row on their own delicate silvered frames, staring out like a flock of bewitched birds.”

Tamara, who was an auxiliary pilot in World War II, settles into civilian life in Ireland. She begins an affair with Niall, a meteorologist who is athletic and handsome.

A decade later, Niall suddenly becomes despondent and breaks off the relationship. Late in the book, he recounts a week-long bicycle race in Ireland called the Rás. Each day is a different stage in the race, and each night, many of the racers drink in a pub. “We called the evening drinks the Night Stages,” Niall tells Tam.

The race is pivotal because Niall competes with Kieran, his younger brother, who left the family home after their mother abandoned the family and committed suicide. He moves in with a woman who is the family’s housekeeper.

Kieran becomes reclusive and falls under the influence of a poet, fisherman and Gaelic scholar named Michael Kirby. He also is in love with Niall’s fiancée at the time.

After the race, Kieran disappears, and Niall feels he is to blame.

Tam eventually leaves for New York but is stranded by fog at the airport in Gander, Newfoundland. There she looks at a mural painted by Kenneth Lochhead, who is the fourth main character in the novel.

Urquhart is able to weave together the strands of these characters’ lives in a way that captures their distinctive traits and reinforces the elegiac tone of the novel.

Her language reflects the different characters. From Niall, the meteorologist, we learn about “parhelia, and fogbows, famous gales and bog bursts, … Sun Dogs, even Moon Dogs.”

Kieran on occasion hears his dead mother’s voice, “as if each word she attempted to say was freighted with such effort that the whisper was more like keening or a long-exhaled sob full of breath and blurred syllables.”

In a note at the end of the book, Urquhart acknowledges that Lochhead and Kirby are based on real people, and Lochhead’s mural at the Gander airport, called “Flight and Its Allegories,” actually exists.

“The Night Stages” is beautifully written and is in many ways a writer’s book. Those looking for a gripping narrative will be disappointed.

This story was originally published August 30, 2015 at 7:45 AM with the headline "Language, not gripping story, marks ‘Night Stages’."